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In view of all this we must now work back from the items to
the unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing.
We ascend from air, light, sun- or, moon and light and sun- in
detail, to these things as constituting a total- though a total
of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the
[kosmic] Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this
point in our survey we have before us the over-world and all that
follows upon it. That suite [the lower and material world] we
take to be the very last effect that has penetrated to its
furthest reach.
Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all,
from the very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate [the
material world] itself receives its share of the general light,
something of the nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the
outcast that at first lay in blank obscurity. It is brought under
the scheme of reason by the efficacy of soul whose entire
extension latently holds this rationalizing power. As we know,
the Reason-Principles carried in animal seed fashion and shape
living beings into so many universes in the small. For whatsoever
touches soul is moulded to the nature of soul's own Real-Being.
We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by
conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for
willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of
sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin
than soul; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies-
toys, things of no great worth- and it is dependent upon all
sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. The
soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might
of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and those
elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later
level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall
short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended
Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world [under the
soul but above the material] the entire shape [as well as the
idea] comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps
its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing,
without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be.
In that world the soul has elaborated its creation, the images of
the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar
purpose.
Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its
powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul
has a double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from
within outwards towards the new production.
In soulless entities, the outgo [natural to everything] remains
dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own
likeness whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has
this tendency to bring other things to likeness; but the soul has
the distinction of possessing at once an action of conscious
attention within itself, and an action towards the outer. It has
thus the function of giving life to all that does not live by
prior right, and the life it gives is commensurate with its own;
that is to say, living in reason, it communicates reason to the
body- an image of the reason within itself, just as the life
given to the body is an image of Real-Being- and it bestows,
also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of which it
contains the Reason-Forms.
The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of
gods and of all else: and hence it is that the kosmos contains
all.
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